16 February 2012

Capital, Volume 1 has 33 chapters. After Chapters 1, 2 and
3, on Commodities, Exchange and Money, and after Chapters 4 and 5, on the
general form of Capital, the remainder of the book is a continuous development
of the concept of Surplus-Value.

There are two main interruptions to this steady tempo,
however. One is the long Chapter 10, called “The Working Day”. We will divide
this big chapter into two. Please download and read Parts 1 to 4 of Chapter 10
via the link given below.

Some notes on “The Working Day”

Marx ends
the first section of the Chapter on “The Working Day” thus: “Between
equal rights force decides.”

In
present-day “human rights” parlance, the opposite is held to be the case, but
Marx is certainly correct. Capitalism is brutal. Equal “human” rights are a
fiction in class-divided society.

“Between equal rights force decides. Hence is
it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a
working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between
collective capital, i.e.,
the class of capitalists, and collective
labour, i.e., the working-class.”

In the
second section, Marx generalises the concept of Surplus Labour to all
class-divided societies, thus:

“Capital has not invented surplus-labour.
Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production,
the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his
own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of
subsistence for the owners of the means of production, [7] whether this
proprietor be the Athenian [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern
landlord or capitalist.”

Section 3
turns back to the most capitalist country that Marx knew, England, and tells
stories of terrible horror having to do with people being worked to death,
including the well-know story of Mary-Anne Walkley, 20 years of age when she
died.

Section 4,
called Day and Night Work, deals with the “relay system”, summed up as follows:

“The prolongation of the working-day beyond the
limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It
quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of
labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore,
the inherent tendency of capitalist production,” says Marx.

The vampire
thirst of capital for the living blood of labour is still in evidence.

Illustration: The “Wobbly” (IWW) version of the poster
originally called “The Czar’s Wedding
Cake”.